WITH NINTH ACCUSER, ANDREW CUOMO VAULTS PAST THE AL FRANKEN STANDARD OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT.
His brother’s network seems quite eager for Cuomo to ride out his numerous scandals: Clown Show: CNN’s John Avlon Asks Blackface Governor Northam If Cuomo Should ‘Follow His Playbook.’
DIDN’T WE KNOW THIS ALMOST A YEAR AGO? CDC tells businesses to ‘end hygiene theater’ because risk of being infected with COVID through surfaces is ‘low.’
EVEN JEN PSAKI REALIZES THIS IDEA WON’T FLY: White House: Americans Not Required to Carry ‘Vaccine Passports.’ “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential. There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”
Chalk this up as a small victory for the #Resistance. Now watch that they don’t try to backdoor it via businesses colluding on basically the same thing.
THIS SEEMS RIGHT: “Interesting perspective from my hedge-fund sources who constantly track DC politics for their impact on mkts: They believe Biden and Dems in Congress see the only way to maintain majorities and keep the WH will be to buy it. They have a small window to do that in (this year and next) so they will ram through as much spending as they can. Ignore the filibuster. Crush Joe Manchin. Ignore any semblance of fiscal restraint. Label anything that opposes their agenda as ‘racist.’ Seems plausible listening to Biden.”
CBS NOW LOSING BOTH SIDES OF THE AISLE: West Palm Beach Mayor Dave Kerner (D) Blasts ’60 Minutes’ Report on Florida Vaccine Rollout: ‘Intentionally False.’
But that’s not stopping CBS! 60 Minutes: We stand by our atrocious reporting on Ron DeSantis and Publix.
THE POLITICS OF PERSONAL DESTRUCTION: Man Behind Alleged Gaetz Extortion Scheme Admits Wanting $25 Million.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Ron DeSantis Has All The Right Enemies. “So long as Donald Trump doesn’t seek the presidency for a third time, it would seem that Ron DeSantis will enter the 2024 Republican primary as a, if not the, front-runner. CPAC’s straw poll pegged him as the favorite in that scenario. As another Republican governor of Florida learned the hard way back in 2016, entering the primaries as a front-runner doesn’t count for quite as much as it once did, but it still counts for something. Moreover, the reasons for DeSantis’s status as a favorite suggest that optimism for his prospective run is more warranted now than it was for Jeb Bush’s run five years ago. What are those reasons? Chief among them is that ‘DeathSantis’ is now trending on Twitter. Sunday evening saw a new, narrative-driven hit on DeSantis drop on 60 Minutes. Already, the segment has been exposed as a fraud.”
WHEN I WAS ON WITH MARK STEYN LAST NIGHT I wasn’t able to plug Stephen Soukup’s book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business, but let me do that now. He goes into how corporate governance works, and explains how lefty activists shaped the battlespace, and into what people can do in response.
As Glenn Greenwald adds, “The quotation highlighted in this tweet is one of the most unintentionally revealing you’ll ever see about how so many people in digital media see themselves versus people without what they regard as the same pedigree and prestige.”
“GIVE AWAY RAZORS, SELL RAZOR BLADES” IS A BUSINESS STRATEGY A LOT OLDER THAN STARLINK: SpaceX Has Been Selling Starlink Dishes at a Huge Loss Despite $499 Price Tag.
NOT CARING WHAT THE PUBLIC THINKS IS THE WHOLE POINT OF BEING A DEMOCRAT TODAY: Public to Biden: Get OK before shipping migrants to towns.
UPDATE: Bad link before. Fixed now. Sorry!
On the morning of April 26, 1973, plainclothes agents of the Czechoslovak secret police (StB) were following “an unknown man, about 40 years old, 175cm tall, slender, with an elongated face, black thinning hair, light-rimmed glasses … carrying a paper board with a map of Prague …” The man was tailed for the remainder of the morning. At approximately 11:35 a.m., he left an exhibition of socialist realist art, dallied a bit, took some notes in the street, and hopped on a tram heading in the direction of the Castle. The agents, who didn’t engage, later discovered the man’s identity after he was checked by a public security patrol: It was the American writer Philip Roth, who was staying in Prague at the Yalta Hotel with a companion named Barbara Sproul.
The StB opened a file on Roth shortly thereafter, based on his having met with “persons of interest in Czechoslovakia, who in 1968 participated actively in the creeping, opportunistic, right-wing developments in the ČSSR.” No conspiracy being complete without an aspect of anti-Semitism, Roth was also flagged as a potential “supporter of international Zionism.” Since Roth had traveled to Prague on a visitor’s visa, he was assigned the case name “Turista” ––“the Tourist.”
* * * * * * * *
Kundera would dramatize this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which his protagonist Tomas is demoted from doctor to window washer, as would Klíma in his novel Love & Garbage, about a writer who composes essays on Kafka in his head while working as part of a cleaning crew. Klíma’s novel is strewn with meditations on the nature of waste, on the things that are carved and discarded. The garbage here is more than just metaphoric. Kundera called it “Totalitarian Kitsch”––“the absolute denial of shit.” Klíma called it “jerkish,” a propagandized pidgin whose shrinking lexis was suitable only for communication between men and monkeys. And it was this piffle that W.H. Auden described in a hotblooded octave he fired off after the events of August 1968:
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
To counteract this, in 1975, Roth helped launch the Penguin paperback series “Writers from the Other Europe,” which published 17 titles (mostly by Czech and Polish authors) until 1989, the first two of which were Vaculík’s novel The Guinea Pigs and Kundera’s collection Laughable Loves. According to Roth, the goal of the project was to “bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers … who though recognized as powerful forces in their own cultures are virtually unknown in America.”
In an era where Marxist-inspired wokedom is rapidly worming its way through colleges and the corporate world, and safetyism-addled crybully newspaper, magazine, and publishing house staffers think that opinions they disagree with are “violence,” Roth’s attempt to bring greater notoriety to writers being brutally punished by what Tom Wolfe once called “socialism done by experts” makes for quite a contrast.
THE DEMOCRATS ARE BECOMING THE PARTY OF RICH WHITE PEOPLE: Trump’s Latino Support Was More Widespread Than Thought, Report Finds.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: A Libertarian Film Festival at FreedomFest in South Dakota.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Reject the Fauci Fetish Perma-Pandemic Panic Porn. “What really makes me dislike the guy, however, is the fact that he obviously doesn’t want anybody to feel better, at least emotionally. I wrote in mid-February that Fauci and Co. were going to start using ‘variants’ as an excuse to keep us cowering and miserable, despite the fact that more and more of us are getting vaccinated.”
GUN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS EVERYWHERE ARE HAPPY ABOUT THIS: Gun ownership among Black Americans is soaring.
The Hill’s photo editor seems to want to make that seem scary. Nice quote from the estimable Prof. Cottrol, though.
YET ANOTHER REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR VOLUNTEERS TO BE SHREDDED BY TUCKER: Tucker Carlson Grills Arkansas Governor on Decision to Veto Bill Banning Gender-Transition Surgery for Minors.
The Fox News host opened the interview with a direct challenge: “I think of you as a conservative. Here you have come out publicly as pro-choice on the question of chemical castration of children. What changed?”
Read the whole thing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Seattle Parents Shocked After Learning Students Will Return To Schools With Homeless Encampments.
It is Seattle after all — should area parents be that shocked?
MAYBE SOME OF THEIR BEST FRIENDS ARE BLACK: Facebook did not hire Black employees because they were not a ‘culture fit,’ report says. “When I was interviewing at Facebook, the thing I was told constantly was that I needed to be a culture fit, and when I tried to recruit people, I knew I needed [to] find people who were a culture fit. But unfortunately not many people I knew could pass that challenge because the culture here does not reflect the culture of Black people.”
RUNNING OUT OF CHOICES ON TECH MONOPOLIES. “It is not often that a concurring opinion of the Supreme Court calls for in-depth comment, but Justice Thomas’ opinion, in Joseph R. Biden Hr., President of the United States, et al v. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, et al., is an exception.”
TAL BACHMAN: We have met the enemy. “The strange figures known as Wokists currently destroying America aren’t just reprises of earlier enemies. They represent something rather new. The political cult of Wokism combines the worst aspects of every political cult in history. Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven’s Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.”
THAT’S WHY THIS IS A GOOD ISSUE FOR REPUBLICANS TO MAKE A FIGHT ON: 75% Say Voter ID Necessary, Majority Oppose Georgia Boycott.
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